All of that information is just a collection of latent facts about electronic devices, until you throw the online social networking phenomenon into the mix. Every computer day brings millions of visitors to YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr, Friendster - and too many others to name. Most of these sites allow their enrollees to post photos and videos to their own pages on the site and to email videos or pictures that they find interesting to their friends.



Those phones and videocams have been put to work capturing spontaneous and occasionally embarrassing moments of individuals, unbeknownst to the filmee - and many of those video files have found their way to the internet. The most notorious of them - an inept amateur sportscast, a clumsy dance imitation, an iPod singalong at the beach - have become cultural flares, drawing millions of viewers as the video is passed from site to site.

The result has been international embarrassment for a few unfortunate souls; it has also led to a general awareness that the contained nature of most faux pas may no longer be contained at all, but may be fodder for a worldwide guffaw. Out of this mix has come a fundamental question of how to define privacy in this world of connectivity - or more appropriately, how to maintain it.

For some people, these incidents have put them in a miserable social situation, recognized for their online video fame and mocked for it. A few have sued the posters of the videos, but that has not changed the personal and irrevocable negative impact. Some of these videos have been viewed millions of times - and some, hundreds of millions. Those single embarrassing moments have become defining images for those individuals who have been targets of these postings that have taken off.

Taking pleasure in the discomfort of others has often been relegated to high school behavior, but the volatile viral nature of these videos suggests that the appeal is much more widespread. There is an entire site now dedicated to embarrassing moments that have been uploaded: ebaumsworld.com. Mr. Baum has dedicated his site to this stuff and racked up ten million in advertising revenue last year.

The legal opinions on uploading videos without the subject's permission are many and varied. One general view is that if the incident took place in public, there is a degree of carte blanche allowed the poster of the video because the public exposure was the subject's choice. If the recording was made by the subject him/herself, then that person holds a copyright to the video and may be able to exert some control over its distribution. And if invasion of privacy is involved, such as a "voyeurcam" posted outside someone's bedroom window, then the legal view is that there is a valid privacy protection issue.

There is a strong, legally defined right to protect the use of one's image for commercial purposes - endorsing products or being used in the production of commercials. In the case of these viral videos however, there is no commercial involvement by the poster or the viewer, and the websites that host these pages are simply intermediaries. The principal recourse in these cases, as in the case of mainstream journalists, is against the creator of the image and not a neutral platform such as MySpace or YouTube.